The 25th Annual North Dakota State Bison Valentine Victory Blood Drive will take place Feb. 10-11 in the Memorial Union Plains Room.

Landin Rognlin, president of NDSU Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, said the goal for the event is 400 units of blood.

“We really want to stand as a Bison family and strike out and get that 400 units because we feel that would show our support (for) the community,” Rognlin said.

All staff, student-athletes and coaches from NDSU sports teams will be present.

The blood drive started out as a student-athlete event where they would recruit as many donors as possible, but the 25th Annual event will be expanded more.

“Greek life is involved, and I personally contacted the (NDSU) Wellness Center and they are going to help us spread that awareness,” Rognlin said.

Rognlin said he feels with a campus of over 14,000, it shouldn’t be hard to reach the blood drive’s goal.

“When you really break it down, the biggest thing that (a student) is giving is a (little) bit of (their) time,” Rognlin said. “A standard donation will take 30-45 minutes, and if that’s all it takes to have an impact on someone’s life, then I say why not?”

The purpose of the event is to help out the blood services as they recently encountered trouble due to blood’s short shelf life.

“They have these events spread out (during) the year to refill their inventory and stock,” Rognlin said.

Rognlin has been helping out with this event for the last three years and said though last year’s event went smoothly, there were some issues.

“In the past years its been hard to get the number of donors that we want especially keeping it restricted amongst student-athlete recruitment because there are a lot of people that donate plasma, but it can be difficult to approach someone you don’t know and ask them to do something like this,” Rognlin said.

This year he will help out by leading the event and encouraging athletes to recruit more donors.

All the units collected from the event will go to the Fargo-Moorhead United Services Banks, will be stored at the South Fargo facility and then distributed throughout the community.

If a student isn’t sure they have the correct blood type to donate, they can visit the United Blood Services site. Donation forms will also be all over campus for students to pick up.

“The easiest way is to come in willing to donate,” Rognlin said. “You are going to go through a short interview process and most likely what’s going to happen is they’re going to take your blood and test it and if anything were to affect that, they will let you know.”

Appointments are held every 15 minutes from 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. Feb. 10 and 9:30 a.m. – 4 p.m. Feb. 11. Call United Blood Services at 701-293-9453 to schedule an appointment or visit BloodHero.com and use the sponsor code athletics. Walk-ins are acceptable as well.

“Overall, we want it to be a campus effort,” Rognlin said. “We want as many people to be involved as we can.”